


Straight for the Castle

by Raptor_Redemption



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Check Out the Summary for More, Daemon Lunafreya Nox Fleuret, Daemon Ravus Nox Fleuret, F/M, Family Dynamics, Hints of Half-Daemon Sex, Mild Gore, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:28:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27527677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raptor_Redemption/pseuds/Raptor_Redemption
Summary: Lunafreya Nox Fleuret, the Oracle, lives beyond Altissia. After five years traversing the World of Ruin, she finds her brother wandering the halls of Zegnautus Keep as a daemon. Together, they return to Tenebrae, their homeland, and reclaim what is theirs.A tour of Fenestala Manor brings varied memories to the surface, and the siblings make the most of their crumbling and decaying childhood home.Among memories of stolen kisses in the ballroom, sneaky meals within the manor's kitchens, and illicit nights in Lunafreya's room just beyond the reach of her Imperial guards, one thing is clear as Luna and Ravus retake Tenebrae and its throne—everything may have changed, but their love for one another has not.
Relationships: Lunafreya Nox Fleuret/Ravus Nox Fleuret
Comments: 5
Kudos: 14
Collections: FFXV Rarepair Big Bang 2020





	Straight for the Castle

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks a million to the hardworking moderators of the FFXV Rare Pair Big Bang and to the artist who collaborated with me on this fic!
> 
> Check out the accompanying art [HERE](https://twitter.com/FFXVrarepairbb/status/1326951131373850627)!
> 
> Title from Halsey's _Castle_.

Lunafreya doesn’t wear white anymore.

She remembers her wedding dress, wonders if it’s still on display in Altissia like an absurd beacon of hope, then pushes the thought from her mind. Even the hazy image of white fabric in her mind is blindingly bright.

It’s been dark for nearly five years, and the imagination is a powerful thing.

She settles more deeply into the wool blankets bundled around her like a little nest, then curls up with her knees against her chest. She’s in the passenger seat of an old pick-up truck tonight, and even a measly, single layer of glass windows and metal frame is a welcome buffer from the plummeting temperatures outside.

Fiddling with a radio and wiping her runny nose on her sleeve, she sighs with relief when fragments of a radio station come through on the mostly damaged junk held together with duct tape and sheer power of will. Her map, torn and mostly illegible from travel wear, boasts just enough information for her to put two and two together.

The station’s location is, if she remembers her geography lessons correctly and from her memory of what this map once was, roughly fifteen miles South of Zegnautus Keep. She’s heard enough rumors to know what might be there, and she has to find him.

She has to find _them_.

Another week’s worth of solitary travel puts her where she needs to be, and though she hunts for two, she returns with only one.

Her next stint of travel progresses more quickly—it’s amazing the difference that the company of another can make—and Luna believes she’s learning of Ravus all over again. He is no longer the brother she once loved and adored, but she is no longer the sister he once held and protected. They’re both monsters now, for better or for worse, but who isn’t a beast beneath the thick sky of Night?

“It doesn’t look so different.” Luna fights to squeeze some trickle of hope into her voice, but is it convincing? She feels Ravus’s narrowed, steady gaze on the side of her head, then,

“Are you saying so to convince yourself or to convince me?”

 _Damn it._ “Both of us.”

Of course the valley entrance to Tenebrae looks different now, scraggly and decrepit compared to its former glory. The dark green of the remaining foliage hides in the night, nearly black against the mountainside where it clumps amongst the scraggly, rotting remnants of less hardy foliage. There is not even moonlight to find its way through the maze of branches, only the pale light from Luna’s trident and the occasional electric spark that Ravus finds strength to summon to his rapier and rusted fingertips.

“Is there a reason we’re waiting to traverse the pass?”

Luna hears the anxiety in Ravus’s voice and it tugs at her chest in tight knots, but she remains firm. “There are no havens in the mountains. You know that.”

One of Ravus’s eyes burns with a dull, purple glow, the pupil narrowing to a slit in the firelight.

“And,” Luna continues. “You are in no fit shape to defend yourself should—“

“Nor are you, Lunafreya.”

“Which is why we remain here.”

Her brother’s concession is silent, but it’s enough. Luna will take any cooperation she can get. The fight in his words is at least more than he could muster a week ago, when she found him barely breathing on a floor marred with blood and miasma at Zegnautus Keep.

Ravus stands. From the corner of her eye, Luna watches him pace beside the fire and rub anxiously at his prosthetic arm.

“It’s bothering you again.”

“I just want to go home, Luna.”

Luna’s heart absolutely shatters. The desperation in Ravus’s voice is nothing short of childlike, the same way he would so often speak of missing their mother when they were young, moments before an imperial soldier would silence him with a backhand across the face that marred those freckled cheeks with bruises more often than not before Ravus learned to obey.

Before he became one of them.

Luna’s whispered “I know” doesn’t keep Ravus from standing on shaky legs and pacing in circles around the outer edges of the haven, as if the demon bubbling inside him craves commune with the other monsters roaming in the darkness just beyond their camp. Luna watches her brother with wary eyes, and her throat tightens. She only wants to see him better. She wants to see him well, prospering, _ruling_ as they were both meant to be.

With some of the Six on her side, Luna’s authority as Oracle still has some meaning, and she is able to keep the worst of the Scourge at bay. However, there’s only so much she can do, and Ravus’s innards still run thick and black. His eyes have lost their humanity. By diverting her own healing efforts to Ravus, she sacrifices _her_ body, too.

The Starscourge has left its blight on both of them, now, and the once regal Nox Fleurets of Tenebrae have been reduced to whatever pathetic shreds of dignity both of them can stitch together. Perhaps there is enough humanity left between the both of them to form one whole person.

They should have grown to rule, but it was taken from them.

An oily, black tear slips down Luna’s cheek.

Everything was taken from them—including one another.

At least now there is less worry of visiting one another in secret, of trading stories and reassurances and kisses in the dark. Who now is not like them, hiding and afraid? At last, Lunafreya and Ravus have lost so much that they no longer care what else could be taken from them.

“We should go tonight,” Ravus finally says, his armor-plated feet coming down hard against the dusty rock and scraping to a halt. “Do you really think we are incapable of taking whatever might come our way?”

As if in answer, a hollow growl echoes from the woods ahead. To anyone else, the forests of Tenebrae are now nothing but collections of inky darkness, a maze full of monsters and despair from which no mortal could escape. Luna and Ravus know these woods, though. The gnarled trees and their twisting branches, barren of leaves in the icy chill of a world without sun, belong to them just as much as the rest of Tenebrae does.

“You always told me you would take it back for us,” Luna muses. She blinks, and the fire smoldering at their feet trickles away into little more than a pile of glowing ashes. Her grasp of magic has greatly improved since the Night fell.

She thinks of Noctis.

“What?” Ravus’s sneer jolts her from memory. “You took me for a liar?”

Luna lifts herself from a kneeling position and looks up at her brother as her lips draw into a thin line. “I took you for someone who would do whatever he had to.” She blinks through a jab of pain that hurries into her temples and drills toward the center of her skull, and each time her lashes lift she finds the world painted in a new hue. The Scourge is changing her, and she wonders how much her eyes are transforming to become like Ravus’s.

He bows his head and turns away.

“Ravus?”

The voice she hears in return is cracked, afraid, ashamed. “The pain gives way to numbness after a time,” he murmurs. “The vision in the night will be worth your trouble.”

Luna craves a mirror to behold herself in. The fright she would give herself is welcome, these days. Anything to feel an ounce of excitement tug at her chest.

They set off down a narrow dirt path that’s long been covered by ice, and they rely primarily on the fall of fresh snow to provide an ounce of traction beneath their feet. They could reminisce about the first times they traversed these woods together, the first time their mother brought them to Tenebrae’s border to peer down into the surrounding valleys and muse about what lay beyond, but they don’t. Instead, Luna spends much of her time holding her head in one hand and grasping at the tattered fabric of Ravus’s coat for balance. A moisture settles into her scalp, layered beneath her hair like a grizzly oil slick. It reminds her of the time she took a tumble down a flight of cobblestone stairs in the garden. As a child, she hadn’t understood the blood that matted her hair or the worried shouts of her mother behind her.

“We need to hurry, Lunafreya.”

Ravus’s voice calls to her, though its distance doesn’t match how close she feels to him when his remaining hand squeezes warmly around her bicep.

“Don’t you hear them?” he asks.

Oh, yes. Luna hears them. She hears _everything_ , and her senses are on fire. The very surface of her skin aches with the added sensation.

“You’re taking too much of my burden.” Ravus’s voice again. Only he could scold her like that.

“I’m taking as much as I’d like.”

Ravus huffs and shakes his head, but nothing more. No, he hadn’t agreed to Luna’s plan to save his life. Yes, she had taken much of his own illness within herself in order to preserve him longer. If it would slow his death, she would happily initiate her own.

She focuses on the surge of strength that comes when her aching bones stretch and groan, on the lightening of the forest around them to hues of grey and black. For the first time in half a decade, Luna can _see_. Even in the darkness, without the glow of the moon, she picks out each and every snowflake that flutters down around them. She notices rocks and dips in the path and hops over them easily. She eyes the rotten detritus of leaves that litter the ground, long dead and turned to mush instead.

She notices the horde of imps pouring in droves down the tree trunks ahead of them, the masses of their bodies clinging to the wood like a swarming colony of insects.

“Lunafreya! Behind me!”

With the silence broken, the imps raise a unified call in as many screeches and shrieks, rushing toward them while Ravus lifts his rapier and shatters the ground around them with a broad radius of crackling lightning. Like the most vicious of summer storms, the clap of thunder comes just after, shaking the ground beneath their feet and shaking snow and icicles from branches above their heads. Imps fly back in droves, while others persist forward. Luna acts on instinct, from habit, calls upon the only remnant of warmth that resides deep within her chest—the blood of the Oracle. The pointed prongs of her trident lift to the sky and herald down her own attack, sparking, fluid magic that still reeks of holiness and light.

_It stinks?_

“Stay back!” she demands as Ravus readies himself to remove a handful of imp heads with a single strike.

_My magic…It’s horrid. Worse than decay._

“We are Lunafreya and Ravus Nox Fleuret of Fenestala Manor, the rightful rulers of Tenebrae and these woods. As the Oracle, blessed by the Six—“ The words choke in Luna’s throat, and the bitterness of iron floods the back of her tongue. “I-I demand that you retreat into the valleys below. This is not your realm. We—“

Thunder crashes around them again, but the aftershocks aren’t enough to keep Luna’s lips from parting and her eyes from widening when she sees the concentration of magic around her trident turn from blindingly white, like her Altissian wedding dress, to a chaotic indigo. Lavenders and deeper hues swirl together into a single frightening column that transfixes each of the remaining imps until it explodes into a shattering screech—a humbling manifestation of the Oracle’s fight against the Starscourge itself. The release of energy is massive, entirely out of Luna’s control, and she pulls Ravus along with her to scatter just as the imps do.

“Lunafreya!”

“I don’t know!” she says. Her body is changing, but her feet are light and her vision is sharper than it’s ever been, and she swears she can smell home. She takes the burst of energy from the war waging within her and pulls Ravus along with her.

During another time, she might have imagined them as children again, bounding amongst the trees during the first days of Spring to find the first patches of sylleblossoms to bloom.

Now, Luna and Ravus run feral through the rotten remains of tree trunks hundreds of years old. Smaller daemons scurry away from their path, while the larger ones keep their distance. Luna catches sight of one or two peering at them between tree branches, eyes glowing the same that hers and Ravus’s do, hiding their bulk in fear of what fate might befall them were they to interrupt these new daemons with the Oracle’s lifeblood still pumping sickly through their veins.

She can’t understand why, but she laughs as they run.

“What’s funny?” Ravus asks.

“I don’t know.”

Neither has broken a sweat, nor do their voices tremor with breathlessness.

“All you right?” Ravus and his silly questions.

Luna ponders for a moment as they run hand in hand along the trail. The slope is steady and upward, enough to have a human’s calves burning with the exertion of the climb. Luna enjoys the simple thrill as her limbs carry her more easily than ever before. The fleece-lined leggings that hug her legs, gray with wear and filth, stretch at the seams. Ravus’s newfound height no longer seems so impressive.

So she is becoming one of them.

“Do I look hideous?” Luna asks, but she giggles when she says it. The laughter bubbles inside her and keeps her light. Much better to focus on that than to worry about how the Scourge melds with the Oracle’s power to create something more fearsome than either one alone. They crest the hill, and when Ravus hasn’t answered her, Luna trots to a stop before taking both of his hands in hers. The difference between the warmth of one and the cool, rusted metal of the other is striking. She takes him in, drinks in his gaze—the concern is still palpable in the little crevice between his brows and the way his mouth turns down at the corners. Even streaked in black, eyes bright and slitted pupils blown wide to drink in any remaining trace of light, Luna easily finds the fear buried there. He is just the same as he’s always been, little more than a frightened boy fighting for the childhood he never had. “Well?”

He seems to be taking in the sight of her the same way, and he pulls his right hand from Luna’s grasp to swipe the calloused flesh of his thumb softly across her cheekbone. “You could never be hideous, Lunafreya.”

She worries her lip between her teeth as his gaze intensifies, and a fire lights in the depths of her belly.

“What happened back there?” His hand traces lower, along the arteries in her neck that pound with her exertion.

“Proof that I will not allow this blight to take us.”

Ravus grins. It’s the first time that Luna has seen such an expression since she found him wandering aimlessly in the keep, his Magitek arm battered and torn from his torso to be found abandoned multiple floors away.

When they can at last avert their gaze from one another, Ravus and Luna alight on the same sight at once.

Tenebrae spreads before them, intricate stone structures and elegant spires amidst floating islands. Where the greenery amongst the islands had once hung lush and full of brightly colored blossoms, dead and twisted vines hang instead. Even from here, they can see the disarray that their home has fallen into.

“The waterfalls,” Luna murmurs atop the crest of the slope they’ve been bounding upon for how long now? Who’s to know with no moon arcing across the sky?

“Yes,” Ravus says. So he can still read her mind at times. It’s a comforting thought. “Frozen and silent.”

“No birds.”

Ravus hums, harmonizing with the hollow tones of the wind, Tenebrae’s only remaining song.

They descend more slowly than they climbed, now free of monsters who would trouble them thanks to the menacing aura exuding in steady waves from Luna’s trident. She squints into the darkness to make out gardens and roads she once knew, only to find that hardly anything remains to welcome them save the bitter smell of gunpowder from so much warfare.

It’s a stink she fears will never leave Tenebrae.

Despite their slower rate into the realm, the time passes more quickly when Luna and Ravus can so frequently tug at one another’s sleeves to remind one another of memories dredged up along the way. It’s not long before they take a well-remembered bend in the road and see Fenestala Manor, their home, looming high and extravagant above them.

Luna’s breath catches in her throat, and her fingers grasp where she’s been absently holding Ravus’s hand.

He says nothing of the manor’s state of decay, and Luna knows better than to break the silence. Still, its decrepit nature is more heartbreaking up close, when it’s so easy to see the spots where stone has been pulverized and where fire has burned at the intricate wooden details of the outer decor.

One of the front doors, a sight to behold at one time, hangs off its hinges.

The other is gone entirely.

The innards of Fenestala Manor are so silent that Luna believes the minute sounds of her own breathing to be drawn within its black hole of quietude. Dust rises in the air and filth cracks the walls, remnants of Tenebrae’s verdant life struggling to force its way into shelter and warmth when the Night descended.

Now, little survives there, save for the tantalizing memories that still lurk in every corner and crevice of the manor. Both fond and horrid tricks of the mind reach out to Ravus and Luna as they stand breathless in the high-ceilinged foyer.

“I always hated this entrance,” Luna says.

It was where the armed guards would meet her, escort her to her room, then lock her within after she was allowed a rare, brief stroll through the manor’s gardens and the sylleblosssom fields on the outskirts (but only when she was lucky and only when she could outrun her guardians).

Ravus is quiet, but Luna watches his chest rise and fall—heaving. He is trying not to cry. He’s remaining numb, just as he always did. It’s how he rose so far.

“I want to try something.” Luna’s insistence is sudden, breaking the moment and tempting Ravus away from memories that tear both their hearts asunder. Against one wall, a hulking floor mirror bordered with intricate gold work sits neglected. A single crack, branched in the lower third of the mirror into a spiderweb of ruin, splits the dull glass in two.

It’s intact enough for Luna to see herself for the first time since the Scourge began to make its mark on her body.

“Quite the pair, mm?”

Ravus doesn’t seem as upset as he should be. Is he not appalled by their descent toward daemonism? Is this very darkness not what the blood of the Oracle is fighting away in Luna’s veins? She purses her lips. “I can fix this.”

“There’s no need—“

“It’s not _right_ that we come to our home like this, Ravus. We—we must be as we once were.” Luna has no idea why she is crying. What is there to cry about when so much is wrong with their world? “I can reverse it. The same way I brought you back to your senses at the keep.”

Ravus catches her hand. “It’s not worth the energy,” he scolds. “If you’re ever hurt because of me, I’ll never forgive myself.”

Luna has been ignoring Ravus’s pleas all her life, and she’s not about to stop now. Yanking her wrist from his grasp, she dismisses his attempts to chide her and closes her eyes instead. “Don’t touch me,” she demands. She’ll need all the energy she can get.

With all the energy of the blessings she’s gathered from the Six, it’s not difficult for the Oracle herself to return their forms to something more human, reminiscent of how they once were. The strain on her body, however, is far more than she’s willing to admit to Ravus, and she only hopes he won’t notice as she ascends the stairs on the other end of the foyer and scurries through the doors that crest the foyer’s second story.

They lead into the ballroom, and she looks down at the abandoned disarray of rubble on the ground floor beneath her while she leans against the railing like an impatient child hoping to be asked to waltz by a handsome prince.

When she feels Ravus’s presence at her side, the air is lighter without the Scourge battling for its dominance within their bodies. Together, they stand in silence. If not for the darkness and the cold and the ruin of the manor, Luna might almost believe the meeting to be something close to _normal_.

“This is where you first told me you fancied men,” she says brightly.

Ravus laughs, or perhaps it’s more of a scoff, but Luna will take what she can get.

“You remember, then?” she asks.

“How could I forget?”

Luna shakes her head. “I suppose. I don’t know why you were so embarrassed.”

“Were you not when you and—“

“ _Hush._ ”

Luna watches Ravus raise his eyebrows, surprised at her sudden curtailing of the conversation. She isn’t sure if her aversion to the topic is because she’s worried about Noctis or if it’s only because she’s loath to be the younger sibling who is teased and taunted, even if she knows that Ravus would only do such things out of love.

Neither of them have ever had minds and wills and emotions and desires set toward monogamy—it’s something they know about one another intimately. Ravus may prefer men, and Luna may prefer women, but they both have exceptions.

It just so happens that Ravus’s woman of choice is Lunafreya herself.

It’s not something they’ve acknowledged for years now, but their fingers snake toward one another as they stand on the balcony overlooking the ballroom, and they hold hands while Luna recalls with joy Ravus’s frustration at being made to dance with so many women.

“Did you ever get your dance with him?” Luna glances up at her brother and winks—a tiny tease will do no harm.

She knows well that Ravus and the boy from a wealthy family just beyond Niflheim’s borders never had the opportunity to waltz as Ravus did with so many other girls from families vying for the throne, but it’s the first time she’s had the courage to ask if they did anything but share a single, chaste kiss beneath the garden’s gazebo.

Ravus rips his hand from hers and glides down the staircase with as much ease as Luna remembers him having. “No,” he calls. “A first kiss and nothing more. The rest was—“

He doesn’t have to say it, and Luna lifts a hand to stop him, shaking her head.

“Aside from you, I—“

“It’s all right, Ravus.”

Luna knows too of Ravus’s “exploration” within the Imperial ranks. She knows of his feats and affairs and trysts, the ones that may or may not have helped him reach the position he died in.

She also knows that he will always have eyes for her.

“It’s only us, now,” she says, then glides down the opposite stairs herself.

She and Ravus meet at the foot of the grand staircase. Above them, on the balcony from which they just descended, Luna sees the grandiosity of a nation long lost. Once colorful banners hang in tatters from the railing, and if Luna squints she can nearly see her mother, Queen Sylva, poised with grace to lead leaders and commoners alike in toasts of honeysuckle mead.

It’s the balcony where Luna would have led similar festivities someday, had things been different.

Ravus startles Luna from a reverie of what might have been by bowing before her, bent at the waist and back straight as he offers his hand. “A dance, my queen?”

Luna watches him carefully, reaches forward to let her fingers brush through the hair that now hangs long past his shoulders and hides his face within a pale veil. “A dance of daemons,” she says.

“Only one of us.”

“No. Both.” Miasma slides from the corner of her eye like a tear. She’s pushed herself too hard to keep their bodies close to human, constantly healing away from their nature to transform otherwise.

She had left the mirror so quickly and with so much hope mounted in her heart that she couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to sustain them like this. Only minutes later, the realization causes her to stumble, exhausted, into his outstretched hand.

With all the grace expected of the rightful heir to Tenebrae’s throne, Ravus holds her tightly against him. His palm presses flat and confident against her lower back, and his other hand joins with her wrist to hold her upright. He leads them in the simplest of waltzes, his feet moving in silent but reliable rhythm.

“We can’t keep this up,” Luna says. She lets her forehead fall against Ravus’s chest and feels the thick, heavy beating of his swollen heart just beneath the skin. “I can’t.”

“The Oracle has never said such a thing, and she will not begin now. Where is my love’s confidence from only moment’s ago?”

Luna shakes her head, but even when she attempts to put an end to the waltz Ravus pulls her along. “I’m not strong enough,” she says. “This simply isn’t viable, Ravus. I can _slow_ the Scourge but I cannot halt its progress forever.”

“Then don’t.”

Ravus does stop, then. He gestures down at his body, frail and damaged despite its newfound humanity at Luna’s hand, and says, “I’ve lived as a daemon without mind or conscience for how long, now? To choose my appearance over my soul, well. The answer should be obvious. As long as I can speak with you, hear your voice, I care not which form I take.”

Luna is quiet, weighted with sudden doubt.

“Whatever happened to my laughing, giggling Lunafreya in the woods just outside, with an Oracle’s trident so powerful it frightened away any beasts who dared come near us?” Ravus cups her face in his hand. “That’s the Lunafreya I want back.”

In ponderous silence, Luna mulls over Ravus’s plea and wanders across the vast expanse of empty ballroom. To think, at one time, this entire floor would have been covered in guests waltzing, drinking, talking, arranging marriages, planning their lives, drooling over what House Tenebrae might have prepared for supper—

Luna imagines that she’ll find more comfort in the dining room, and she’s right.

When she moves from the vast ballroom to a space more intimate, a place she once shared with Ravus and her mother and their nearest servants, her burden feels lighter. Sylva herself might as well have been there to lift the weight from Luna’s chest.

“Luna?”

She hears Ravus trailing eagerly behind her, but she only pushes through another set of doors from the dining room and into the manor’s impressive and spacious kitchen.

There, amidst the disarray and dirty dishes of the manor’s last meal before the sun’s disappearance, comes a sense of something even warmer and more comfortable, something far away from the forward-facing foyer and ballroom and dining room, where young royals were expected to act as such.

Young royals. Political prisoners. There hadn’t been much difference until Ravus had gained enough favor with the Imperials to find some small minutia of pity for himself and his sister.

It’s the only reason Luna was ever allowed in the kitchen.

“I miss proper food,” she says suddenly. “What we made together. Like Mum.”

Ravus blinks, and his eyes glow with the thrill of a good memory. “There may be preserves left, if the animals haven’t gotten to them by now.”

The siblings’ gaze meets, lights like a flame sparked at last after a long rain, and they rush together through the double doors leading into the ample kitchen behind the remains of a more formal dining area.

They’ve long lost the need for their artificial lights. By now, even human eyes might have adjusted to the darkness, but Luna and Ravus have much more. Luna is still not accustomed to the changes, if she’s honest, but she won’t reject them when they mean survival.

She sees the kitchen’s depths in a hue somewhat monochrome, but shapes and objects are clear. She and Ravus forage together through cabinets, picking through filth and thick cobwebs to understand what’s left in the pantries. A hiss of gas and flick of lightning from Ravus’s finger tells them both that at least one gas stove has remained functional, and Luna leaps toward the heat to hold her hands out beside it.

All thoughts and fears of maintaining human forms, of daemons and the Night, are gone for the moment. This feels more like a slumber party, the times when she and Ravus would sneak into the kitchen past their bedtimes, when there were no Imperial guards to keep them confined to their rooms and when the most trouble they’d run into was a scolding from their mother the next morning.

“I saw some crackers,” Luna says, and Ravus lifts a dusty jar of jam as if in a silent toast. Luna claps her hands together. “Almost like afternoon tea. I don’t suppose?”

“If there were tea to be found, it would be horrendously stale.”

Luna barks out a laugh. “Oh, please. As if I’m not accustomed to ‘pine needle tea’ and the like, now.”

Though reluctant to remove her hands from the warmth of the gas stove, the notion of a proper pot of tea propels Luna away from the heat and toward the kitchen’s ample cabinets. Most are empty, littered with mouse droppings and cobwebs, but a few treasures remain.

Black tea leaves are one of them.

“Oh, Ravus, I could _cry_.”

He chuckles at her but doesn’t hesitate to take a hearty sniff of the tea himself.

“More excited than you let on, aren’t you?” Luna teases.

Together, they make quick work of gathering plates and teacups and silverware now dull from disuse, snacking and drinking and preparing all the pieces to a discordant meal as they find scarce other canned goods in the pantries. Each “course” brings new memories to mind, and they chatter idly until the warmth of food in their stomachs and the comfort of each other’s company has them feeling drained again.

The cold of Night is quick to eat at even the most nourished of survivors, Luna has found.

With their bellies full of crackers and sweet jam that sticks to the roof of their mouths, they wander more deeply into the manor, up a winding staircase still standing despite the manor’s decay from war and all else that’s come with the temporary end of the world. Luna lets her hands run gently along the weeds and sparse foliage that have grown up around the cracks and around the banisters. In the cold, there is little that can survive, but that hasn’t stopped the wildlife of Tenebrae from doing its best to find its way indoors to escape the inhospitable conditions.

She takes particular notice of one vine studded at regular intervals with pearly little buds, unopened and likely permanently stunted by the frost. “Poor things,” she murmurs, but Ravus says nothing. Instead, she hears the steady clang of his armored boots against the stone stop, and the weight of still silence hangs heavy across her shoulders.

“Look,” he whispers.

With one finger, Ravus points delicately to blossoms barely peeking from the bud’s confines. Stunted, yes, but dead? Far from it. Luna could cry at the sight of it, and she nearly does. “So silly,” she breathes as she wipes at the prickling sting in her eyes.

“Not at all.”

She has no idea how long they stand beside one another, Luna’s fingers toying fondly at Ravus’s waist while she traces the blossoming white flower with delicate strokes.

“Come on,” Ravus says at last. His voice is softer than Luna has heard it in years, as if his presence in their home has softened his sharp edges and returned some of the older brother Luna had once known. “Perhaps there will be more deeper within? I imagine we can light a fire upstairs. We should begin to think about rest.”

“If you’re thinking about my moment of weakness in the ballroom, I’ll have none of it. I’m fine now,” Luna insists. She hopes that her playful smirk communicates her capabilities. “Was just hungry, is all.”

Ravus lifts a single pale eyebrow, but Luna is pleased to know that he knows better than to argue any further with her. Nonetheless, he grasps her hand and pulls her along up the stairs. The manor’s layout comes back to Luna piece by piece, her memory jogged at each turn. Electricity may have been lost long ago, but she remembers fondly the large, intricate fireplaces in the bedrooms and the study. As they progress down dark halls, gooseflesh rises at the back of Luna’s neck. She’s not afraid any longer, and yet she half-expects some hideous creature to come at them from the darkness and fight for territory it thinks to be its own.

The longer they go without encountering any intruders, the more at peace Luna feels. Before long, they find the library’s door ajar, and Ravus pushes it open with an eagerness that warms Luna’s heart.

“It always was your favorite room,” she says, but any fond reminiscence comes to a halt when she sees the torn and scattered pages fluttering aimlessly across the plush rugs on the floor. The draft could be coming from anywhere—an open window further within or yet another crack into the roof. Luna squints, acclimating still to her newfound vision in the dark, and lifts a hand to her mouth.

The library—or what’s left of it—is in complete and utter tatters. She watches, her stomach through the floor, as Ravus slips his hand from her grasp and kneels among the book bindings and shredded tomes. “Ash,” he says when he lifts his exploring hand from the floor and peers at the dust that’s accumulated on his fingertips. Luna follows his gaze toward the back of the library, where the scattered books pile higher and higher into a mountain of kindling. The fireplace itself is entirely full of ash and the remains of books long burnt away.

“You don’t think—?”

Ravus purses his lips. “No. Anyone struggling to stay alive here has long since moved on or—“

“It was horrible,” Luna says, remembering the beginnings of the Night, the years of radio broadcasts that kept her company alone in the dingy truck she rescued from an abandoned parking lot on the outskirts of Altissia once she had healed. “The Lestallum plant functioned for as long as it could, but there was only so much to be done. Places out here in the wilderness lost their heat, first. Anything flammable was worth more than life itself. People have—“ Luna clears her throat to push back the threat of tears. “They’ve fought hard. So many have lost, Ravus. We can’t be mad at them. We can’t.”

She watches, forlorn, as her brother’s eyes sink into something hollow and so devoid of emotion. The library had been his escape as a child, and his means to something greater, too. History, tactics, social and political accounts, and anything else he could get his hands on—all of it chiseled him into the perfect Imperial weapon. There had been other books, too, of course—his favorites.

Those he kept in his room, beneath his mattress and far away from the guards’ prying eyes.

“I’m not upset,” he finally says. “As much as I found comfort here, you could say it was this room that made me a monster. I hope they burned the Imperial accounts first.” His smirk is as wicked as it is teasing, and Luna could melt at the way his cheek dimples with the slight upturn of his lips. “Come on. There are happier places than this.”

Luna is glad to move on, away from the perfect symbol of what survival has looked like for the past half a decade. An instinct overtakes her, and out of respect she shuts the library door behind her when they move back out into the hall.

“If they’ve defiled Mother’s room, however, _that_ will be another story.”

Quick to settle her hand comfortingly against Ravus’s elbow, Luna shakes her head. “Don’t think about that. I’m sure her room is…I’m certain it’s fine.”

They don’t have to speak the memories aloud to relive them together, and they both know better than to vocalize their feelings.

It’s the same when they arrive to Luna’s old bedroom, where the silence may be uncomfortable but it’s not awkward. Luna and Ravus know well what it’s like to stew with one another, deep in thought. This is nothing new. Still, the quietude and the uneasy, crawling sensation in Luna’s stomach yields entirely when she and Ravus come upon the doorway to her own bedroom.

It’s so quiet that Luna swears she can hear the gentle whispers of guards, just the way that she’d be privy to murmured complaints and gripes on the other side of her door.

“It looks different without soldiers on either side of it,” she says wryly.

Ravus silences any further thought she might have with a kiss. It’s the first time they’ve had their lips together in so much longer than Luna would like to admit. She doesn’t care to think about their time apart, only what they can accomplish once again now that they are together. In the manor’s quietude, Luna hears every detail of their kiss as well as she feels it, and the slick sound of Ravus pulling away from her has her panties just as wet as her mouth.

“Guards be damned. The room will look just the same when my beautiful Lunafreya is inside it.”

As he pushes the door open for both of them, Luna doesn’t miss the hearty flush that’s risen onto Ravus’s cheeks. She knows that look well, reads the glassiness of his gaze like an open book. Now _that’s_ a tome she would happily tear pages from in order to cherish forever. It’s been so long, but she remembers so vividly what Ravus looks like when he’s away from the Empire’s prying eyes and in her company alone. Luna likes him that way—shameless and undone—and stepping into her bedroom makes the memories more vivid than ever.

It is perhaps the least disturbed room of all that they’ve wandered through thus far. Six, even her bed is still made; despite the layer of dust, the down comforter and pillows comprise the coziest sight she’s seen since before she had been made a peace offering to Lucis. One step at a time, she pushes her way forward into the room, her eyes lighting on each and every part of the decor as she clings to the memories and rides them from one corner of her room to another.

Her heart leaps when she hears the barely perceptible _click_ of the door behind her.

Of course, when she spins on her feet, her mind takes her to a place entirely new and yet so old at once. “Ravus.” The name comes out of her as involuntarily as a breath, and she shudders beneath his gaze.

“Do you remember, Lunafreya?”

She swallows hard, and still Ravus moves forward.

“Remember what?”

He tilts his head and smirks, playful disappointment brightening his features. “I always concocted the most absurd stories, you know. When you rise high enough in rank so quickly, nearly anything you say becomes believable.”

Luna is lifted, and suddenly she feels herself floating. On either side of her thin waist, Ravus’s hands are spread wide and secure. Together, they spin—once, twice, three times—and looking down at the adoring twinkle in Ravus’s eyes has Luna’s stomach turning with a cocktail of emotions she has yet to grasp. Her flight through the air is brief before she lands on her back on her bed. Dust flies up around her in disorganized eddies, and a second wave tempts her sinuses when Ravus falls down around her.

They’re not even beneath the blankets, but already Lunafreya is so warm with her brother’s hands flat on the mattress on either side of her head and his knees pushing so deliciously against the swell of her hips. His lips crash down onto hers and, for the first time since they’ve reunited amidst the Night, Ravus slips his tongue just beyond her teeth. The push is wet, hot, firm, and she eagerly accepts it into her mouth with a quick test of her own. Their tongues together light a spark deep within her that’s lacked kindling for far too long—even without the shelter of the comforter and the sheets that the bed has to offer, Luna settles into a warmth that she’s forgotten is possible.

“Ravus,” she gasps.

“Well?” His breath is hot against her parted mouth. “Do you remember?”

Luna can’t believe he could be so bold as to ask twice. “As if I could forget, brother.”

The memories come crashing down around them both as fingers desperately claw at the multiple layers of clothing wrapping them both in some semblance of protection from the cold.

Feelings that Luna hasn’t had wash over her in some time course through her body like the warmth of a hot beverage on a freezing day, like the first taste of stew after a difficult spar and a longer day, like a splash of cool water after a week’s travel without a bath. To have Ravus atop her like this is nothing short of intoxicating, and the relief lightens the load she has tasked her body to carry.

Distracted from the strain of her duty to keep symptoms of the Scourge at bay, she notices a few lines tracking their way across her brother’s face, and a thick drop of miasma slips from his nose onto the corner of her mouth. From there, it falls to her chin and leaves a dark trail behind it. “I-I—“ she breathes. “The magic I need to—“ She can only imagine how her own face and body must be transforming again, and Luna could chide herself. To think that such a simple distraction could keep her from protecting them both. To think that sexual lust, the needs of her body, could overcome the needs of her soul.

 _He is no simple distraction, though_ , Luna reminds herself. _He is Ravus Nox Fleuret, and he is my everything._

Ravus’s body pushes insistently against hers in a slow rhythm. “And why would you need magic, my dear Lunafreya? Why would you need to hide yourself from me?” He straightens his arms to increase their distance, and Luna forces her eyes to focus as she meets his gaze above her. “For you to think that I wouldn’t fuck you just like this, here and now.”

Luna only wonders what he could mean until she pokes her tongue out to swipe along her lower lip, already swollen from the ministrations of her brother’s worrying teeth. Something thick and heavy like oil, sour and smelling of decay, greets her tongue. The substance pours from her own mouth, and she imagines how the thick borders of black might look between her teeth.

Nevertheless, Ravus strokes her cheek. “You are eons more beautiful than you could ever imagine, Lunafreya.” He kisses her again, clumsily nudges between her legs with a knee. “Please, stop worrying. For me, sister. Allow me to love you the way you are.”

His words are smooth, as always, and Lunafreya allows her magic to falter until they both slowly assume their truer forms—something between human and daemon. When she kisses Ravus again, she is hesitant, but more and more she recognizes just how perfectly they fit together this way. Perhaps, just maybe, it is even better than how they meld within their human skins. As magic washes out of her, its familiar buzz is replaced with something more—a confidence and prowess that can come only with the attitude of a predator, a _monster_. The strength is as new and exciting as it was back in the woods, and a growl leaves Luan’s throat that’s rich with thrill and arousal. She swears she felt the twitch of Ravus’s cock through his trousers along with the rumbling vibration in her throat.

“Like this?” she breathes.

“Yes. Like this.”

Luna takes in a deep, gurgling breath through the miasma but finds energy in the filling of her lungs. An idea strikes her, and she’s never thought _less_ about the consequences of her actions than she does now. Her limbs wrap around Ravus in a way so specific that she fears he’ll catch onto her plan. There’s no way to _not_ be intentional about this; even as she thinks it, Ravus’s body flips without resistance, and Luna’s heart jumps.

When she regains her balance, poised neatly atop him with her knee grinding against his sac and eager erection, Luna grins. She grins and tilts her head. The silent question that makes her eyes light and brightens her expression asks only, _And yet you didn’t expect this?_

Ravus’s empty blink gives Luna all the answer she needs.

With their forms balancing so closely between human and daemon, it’s much easier to summon their claws and rid themselves of the clothes that remain. Fabric may be precious in the cold of Night, but more primal instincts overcome them both.

The cool air pricks more and more at Luna’s skin—in their passionate haste they forgot entirely to begin a fire as Ravus had suggested downstairs—but the discomfort falls away when her bare skin makes contact with Ravus’s. So long has it been since they’ve lain together like this, since Luna has lain with _anyone_ , that even the slightest of touches cascade through her nerves like the very lightning that Ravus conjures at his fingertips. From the deepening red of his face, Luna can tell that Ravus is quite enjoying their change in position, and Luna scrambles to please him more.

She remembers, with a heavy weight in her heart, how little she had to live for as a political prisoner of the Empire. Of course, she had written her letters and found joy with Pryna and Umbra, but the most organic forms of pleasure had come whenever she was the cause of Ravus’s face twisting in pleasure or his lips parting in a gasp unlike anything his commanding officers or subordinates had ever seen.

The excitement is no less now, she finds, drinking in the delights of Ravus’s slack jaw when she takes his swelling erection in hand and tugs it to its full length. So long has Luna ignored her own feelings, her humanity, that the surge of arousal within her has her chest tight. Perky breasts peaked with nipples hard at the cold heave along with her breaths, and Ravus’s eyes go glossy when he sees them. She watches his tongue waddle purposelessly in his mouth when his lips part, then welcomes the brush of his fingers over one of her breasts.

The most finely crafted Magitek armor on Eos joins Ravus’s remaining hand, and Luna leans just as eagerly into the cooler, harder sensation. There’s no way she could ever choose one hand over the other or decree which is better. Where the prosthetic lacks finesse, she supplements her own movements and grinds her nipple over the firm ridges of the finger joints. Thank the Six, Ravus picks up on her ideas and lets his Magitek fingers fall to his slack lips, dragging them along the slick saliva on his tongue before returning them to her breast and rubbing with new fervor.

“You always did have the most sensitive little breasts,” he murmurs, reverent.

Luna rewards him with a particularly fierce tug at his cock, even managing to swipe her thumb across the slit to catch a translucent pearl of precum. “To think that you’re just as eager, as well,” she says, even as a damp, unmistakable heat spreads across the lips of her cunt and warms her entrance. Needing more, craving the next level that will bring her to a long-needed release, she leans forward until her small tits hang just perfectly above Ravus’s astounded face. One nipple brushes his lips, slick and red against his pale skin, and he pulls her nipple into his mouth with expert, well-timed suction. He kneads the soft flesh of Luna’s breast within his mouth, careful of his teeth and flicking the tip of his tongue affectionately across her nipple before releasing her tit with an obscenely wet pop and dragging the flat of his tongue along the swollen nub.

“Inside me,” Luna breathes. She wouldn’t have known that she said it had she not heard the very words pour from her mouth.

 _He’s still quiet during sex_ , she thinks fondly. Apart from Ravus’s earlier comment, there is no string of naughty promises, no lewd observations, nothing that would sound uncouth from a high commander’s mouth save for the debauched whines and moans she strings out of him when the blunt head of his cock pushes just against her cunt. “Is it all right, Ravus?” Even as Luna is guiding his cock within her, she feels it necessary to ask. Had he been the one in control right now, he would have done the same.

He always has.

“More than all right,” he promises, the words hardly more than panted breaths.

Luna may not have fucked in some time, but that doesn’t mean she’s forgotten her body and how they fit together. Kneeling on either side of Ravus’s hips, she lowers herself an inch only to lift herself again and come down a little harder. The burn is exquisite and dissipates quickly, and she’s grateful to the Six for the way that the Night has melded her body into something leaner and more muscular than the last time Ravus had known her. With stronger thighs and a core tighter around her middle, Luna keeps full control. She’s careful not only for her own sake but also because she finds a debased pleasure in the way Ravus whimpers when she pushes down and unsheathes him from her in the same moment.

Through gritted teeth, Ravus finally mutters, “Enough teasing,” and the simple _hint_ of harshness in his tone has Luna happily giving in. She falls onto the remainder of him until he’s bottomed out inside her and her bare buttocks lay against the tops of his thighs. By the time Luna leans over him, much of her hair has fallen from her ponytail, and it falls around her face like a golden veil so bright against Ravus’s own pale strands. She takes the opportunity to let a lock of his hair slide through her fingers while his cock twitches with a need for friction inside her.

“Magitek,” Luna whispers. “It’s taken so much life from you.” She remembers a day when his hair held just as many karats as hers, but that was long ago. Even prior to the Scourge infecting his body, Luna remembers how the hue of his left eye had changed in time with the pulses of _magic_ or _energy_ or whatever else the Empire had said they were pumping inside Ravus to assist with his healing.

Ravus begs, “Not now,” in a voice so strained he could have been dying. Luna knows better know, remembers their jokes of literature and “little deaths” after Ravus’s long days in the library. How many plays had he read aloud to her? How many fairy tales after hours of pouring over tomes filled only with death and war?

He punctuates his sentence with a tight grasp around Luna’s hips. His fingers dig into the plush of her hips, his thumbs pushing into the divots at the base of her spine as if he had found them by memory, and Luna’s posture straightens with her wail. “All right,” she tries to say, though she thinks the words may have only escaped as a sigh or something else entirely. Six know what kinds of sounds Luna can make that she’s forgotten all about.

Perhaps she’s been still for too long, or maybe Ravus is simply impatient, but Luna’s heart bounds high into her throat when his inhuman grasp lifts her weight from his cock only to lower her back down again. Just like that, he fucks her onto his cock again and again. It’s easy to go limp in his arms, enjoyable even, and Luna allows herself to float away into the tight net of safety that Ravus has cast around her. Even with the guards outside, with the promise of him leaving Tenebrae for days at a time to attend to some fascist business, Luna had always found safety with Ravus inside her.

Now is no different, and as he bounces her up and down, sloppily shifting his angle through desperation in an attempt to match each and every one of Luna’s whines. She falls into memories the same way she falls into relative comfort and safety. Full, her walls clenched tightly around him, her conscious will slips further away from her duty as Oracle.

It’s not something she notices until the blunt nub of Ravus’s horn parts his hair just above his ear and the skin around his mouth, between his lips, begins its decay. As he pants, his mouth open wide, Luna’s stomach sinks at the gruesome sight of it all. Tendrils of decaying flesh pull between his gums, but Ravus takes no notice as miasma seeps from his pores. She is no stranger to slickness of her own, but the sensation of miasma is something different entirely. It claims her body just as it fills Ravus to the brim, and Luna hears her own moans distorted as she sinks down hard and deep onto his cock again, again, _again_. Together, the siblings howl in the night, daemons fucking in the dark in one final attempt to reclaim a part of their lives that nothing, not even the Night, could take from them now.

Ravus doesn’t tell Luna that he’s close. Luna doesn’t need him to tell her. She knows all on her own, and she clenches around him in whatever spasmodic patterns she can manage until she feels the tell-tale pulse inside her. It’s subtle, barely there, but Ravus’s face tells all. His cum spreads within her, the fluid uncharacteristically cool as he slips further away from humanity. Luna takes advantage of the new sensation to lift herself up, down, up, and down again, savoring the tingle of cum leaking from her pussy while she continues to ride him. Even in the room, well below freezing and without a fire, Luna welcomes the cool temperature of his cum inside her, not unlike a soothing balm against a burn.

Eventually, she falls from him despite her reluctance to experience what it’s like to be empty again.

Her chest heaves, but as she moves to comfort Ravus throughout the afterglow of his orgasm, Ravus has already found his place atop her again. He looks nearly the same as he did when Luna found him roaming, collapsing, and roaming again the endless maze of Zegnautus Keep. He’s huge now, returned to his full daemon height with his feet hanging well away from the edge of her bed. And yet, as he lowers himself to suckle at one of Luna’s nipples and tweak the other between his fingers, she sighs like a maiden when she catches the last remaining glimpse of adoration in his eyes.

“I love you, Ravus,” she says.

Her cunt may be clenching around nothing and her brother’s cum may be leaking out in wet globs from between her thighs, but Luna can breathe again. She allows herself to relax, sink into her mattress, and leave the work to Ravus. The quick burst of energy is enough for her to regain some control over her magic, and she watches Ravus transform back to something closer to his original form the same way she had watched him degrade back to monsterhood just beneath her.

She finishes _embarrassingly_ quickly, floating, her body as full of electricity as the aftershocks of Ravus’s magic.

His voice startles her from the dream she chases upon dozing. “There is one more thing I want to see before we sleep, Lunafreya. Come with me?”

She can’t possibly imagine what Ravus could be prattling on about, but she stirs nonetheless, only to find her dress and jacket torn asunder on the floor. It would seem that neither she nor Ravus have learned their own strength in their daemon forms.

“Here.” Ravus drapes a shawl around her shoulders, woven soft and thick with the colors and unicorn of the Nox Fleuret crest. “It’s all right. There will be plenty of time for you to search your closets for proper clothes.”

Luna can’t possibly imagine what he could mean, but dazed from her afterglow, she’ll follow Ravus anywhere. In her exhaustion, she can only manage to suppress her and her brother’s newfound characteristics so much; once again they are trapped in a realm somewhere between human and daemon.

 _A common form for us these days, I imagine,_ she thinks as she pulls on her fleece leggings and baggy socks.

Bleary-eyed in naught but a shawl on her top half and her undergarments below, she walks hand in hand with Ravus back down to the manor’s main floor. With her other hand, she holds her covering tightly around her, her fist clasped between her breasts now littered with the faint remnants of nibbled kisses.

Then, Luna realizes where he’s taking her. “The throne?”

“Mm.”

“Why?”

 _“_ Because you belong there, of course,” Ravus says.

For a moment, Luna meets his insistent gaze, but then her eyes are drawn to the ruined throne room ahead of them. It’s decidedly cooler in this wing of the manor, and she’s quick to see why—a massive hole likes unobstructed in the ceiling, baring Tenebrae’s royal seat to the night sky.

Still, Ravus merely steps around the rubble and leads Luna down the hall as if she’s being walked to the altar at her wedding.

They reach the base of the stairs just before the throne and Ravus says, “Stay with me here until the dawn, if it comes?”

“When it comes,” Luna corrects, ever the optimist.

Ravus closes his eyes, bows his head, and sighs through his nose. “If you say so, Lunafreya. My queen.” He gestures toward the throne, clapping dust from his palms and offering his hand to Luna to help her up the remaining couple of stairs.

_Queen._

Luna supposes she was always destined to rule, one way or another. She remembers Ravus’s bitterness when his fate did not deem him the same calling, but as his hand reaches down to her it’s as if all of that jealousy has melted away into a deeper understanding. “It would be a pleasure to rule Tenebrae alongside you.”

She takes Ravus’s hand and ascends the stairs, her chest and torso still bare save for the shawl bearing the Nox Fleuret crest that’s draped over her shoulders. The subzero temperatures strike her less now that the Starscourge has taken up residence within the Oracle herself, becoming a single entity with the power only she can wield. The entropy of the battle lights a fire in her soul that spreads to her fingertips, and she knows that Ravus will feel the same. The same blood runs through their veins, after all. ”With naught but daemons and dead, trampled gardens as our subjects?”

As he delicately guides her toward the seat’s faded indigo velvet and its decay-worn cushions, Ravus earnestly teases her. “And now who is skeptical about the Dawn’s return?”

Ravus is right. If there’s anyone on all of Eos who knows what it’s like to suffer heartily before rising to victory, it’s him. If he could make it from war prisoner to the High Commander of the Imperial Army, could Sylva Via Fleuret’s heirs not rise to their sacred duties and reclaim their homeland?

Luna sits and gazes out across the room, down the manor’s hall and to the great oaken doors beyond. She surveys the columns and the browned and withered vines crawling up the marble’s surface. There is something missing, though, an emptiness that has her pursing her lips and pulling the shawl more tightly around her bared chest and stomach.

“Something wrong, Highness?”

Silence is the only way that Luna can convey the answer. Truthfully, she doesn’t know, but all becomes clear when Ravus perches himself on one arm of the throne and reaches around his sister’s shoulders to pull her closer against his side.

She sighs, then settles into him. Where the ceiling has caved from the toils of war and neglect, Luna peers up into the night sky where a sea of stars await her. She imagines what the moon might look like there, one day, when it is once again granted the ability to reflect the sun’s brilliance into the night. A line of Tenebrae’s residents and the manor’s servants bustling through the halls would liven the stark and empty hall, but Luna finds herself grateful to the single imp who crawls in from outside. It is low to the ground, head hanging and claws clasped in front.

It approaches, wary, and falls prostrate to the daemon rulers of Tenebrae and the Night.

“No, Ravus, love. Nothing is wrong at all.”

**Author's Note:**

> So little content exists for this ship that I was just happy to put some out into the world for other rarepair shippers to enjoy. Please leave a comment if you made it to the end and let me know what you thought!


End file.
